Tag Archives: I’m living in my own private Tanelorn

To say that Anno Domini 2002 was a bunkerbuster and kidney stone of a year was a bit of an understatement. The year started with the realization that the tech boom of the previous four years was over and done: much as with the pundits seeing signs of recovery from the crash of 1929 in January 1930, business analysts watching the detritus from the dotcom boom kept seeing new sprouts in the manure pile, but they weren’t visible from the ground level. The number of poorly managed built-to-flip tech companies blaming their implosions on 9/11 just kept climbing, and those of us who made plans for the future based on relative employment stability pretty much dropped everything and hung on. In my own case, the company that had hired me for a three-year stem-to-stern documentation revamp suddenly made the news for creating the 38-day monthly reporting period, and while its co-CEOs wouldn’t see the inside of prison for fraud for a few years, the rest of us wouldn’t be there to wave goodbye. Goodbye, steady paycheck: hello, wildly variable schedule at a Dallas liquor store that paid enough for rent or the car payment but not both at the same time.

If evil is the loam of the decay of virtue, from which new good will sprout again, 2002 was a raised bed garden the size of a football field. In very short succession, I lost two cats, brother and sister that I’d bottle-fed as kittens after they’d been abandoned at a Goodwill truck 14 years before, and a grandmother. Driving out to bury one of the cats led to a head gasket on my car blowing out, with a very expensive tow back to town. Oh, and let’s not forget the root canal, or the move to a barely affordable apartment just before the divorce was final. The absolute nadir, though, was watching as a haphazard pro writing career crumpled under the deaths of innumerable seemingly stable paying publications. This was matched by any number of wannabe editors who assumed that publication was enough of an honor without grubby compensation marring it, and by the end of May, with just the latest zine dweeb asking for submissions and responding to queries of payment with “Since I’m not a well-heeled trust fund baby, I’ll pay when the magazine starts making money and not before,” I was done.

By the middle of September, when the despair of working retail in a liquor store during the holidays was a regular morning and evening dread, a glimmer of light came through with a call from a company in Florida seeking a technical writer. It was coming out of a dotcom bankruptcy, they warned, and Tallahassee wasn’t Miami or Orlando. The pay wasn’t what was standard for that sort of position a few years earlier, the benefits were pretty bad, and the lead developer would disappear for weeks in his quest for a Russian mail-order bride. However, one of my potential co-workers brought in her pet Vietnamese potbellied pig on Fridays, the initial interview went well, and I had an old friend in Tally who recommended the place as somewhere to relax: Jeff VanderMeer, whose novel Annihilationcomes out as a film early next year. Jeff had delivered several well-placed slaps upside the head during my writing days, and if he was living out there, then it was worth the monumental move out there, wasn’t it?

To cut to the end, the job didn’t work out. Three months in, and about three days before I was to fly back to Dallas and marry Caroline, Delenn to my GIR, the president of the company decided that the gigantic software project planned for January 2003 didn’t need to happen, and a dead project didn’t need a technical writer. Since I’d already paid for plane tickets about an hour before getting notice, that meant sitting around in Tallahassee for three days before returning to Dallas, getting married shortly after Christmas, and flying back to Tally on New Year’s Day to pack up everything and drive back one last time. Noon on January 2, 2003 found me on a nearly-deserted beach in Gulfport, Mississippi, looking across Coke-bottle glass water on the Gulf of Mexico, coming across the occasional enormous fish bone or mangrove seed, and wondering “So what’s the rest of the year going to be like?” Considering how the previous four months had gone, most people would have been embittered for years on both career and locale and never returned.

But.

In many ways, Tallahassee was the right place at the right time. A lack of money precluded a lot of activities, so that meant sitting in a rented room and reading all night. (My roommate was thrilled with this, as I was decidedly less dramatic than his previous roommate, AND I paid my rent on time without reminding. He was also a hopeless fan of the Britcom Absolutely Fabulous, so discovering that my ex was a physical and temperamental ringer for Edie Monsoon just meant that half of Florida’s gay community had to come by and meet Edie’s third ex-husband.) That also meant getting a cram course on Florida natural history and paleontology, especially from the number of Florida State University postgrads at the long-defunct goth venue Club Jade looking for an ear actively interested in their research. The geology and history of Wakulla Springs, the world’s largest freshwater spring, took up a lot of that spare time, and the springs’ steady year-round water temperature meant that swimming outdoors in unchlorinated water in December was an option. The biggest lateral turn in my life, though, came upon a visit to the Tallahassee Museum my second day in town. The Museum is more of a wildlife park and nature preserve than museum as most people would know it, and among enclosures for Florida panthers and river otters were collections of plants that I’d vaguely read about but had never seen in person. Right at the Museum entrance was a collection of Sarracenia purple pitcher plants, and right there was where my old life ended.

Returning to Dallas in 2003 wasn’t a huge improvement on 2002: moving back didn’t remove the reasons for moving out. What changed, though, was a big chunk of Tallahassee that remained under the skin. About a week after getting back, a run to a local Home Depot for new bookshelves led to coming across a display of assorted carnivorous plants for sale, and that’s when it really went down. Although I suffered a few writing relapses (all but one being so aggravating or humiliating that the bug is burned out forever, culminating with threatening to dox the entire management ladder at SyFy in order to get paid), the rest of the time between then and now has focused on the carnivores. This has led to friendships with experts and fellow dilettantes in the field, for all of whom I’d take a bullet without hesitation, and a constant sense of “So what’s next?” Every time I ask that question, someone comes up behind and tells me “If you like that, check THIS out,” and down another rabbit hole I go.

In a very roundabout way, this is a way of thanking the Dallas Observer for voting the Texas Triffid Ranch as one of its Best of Dallas 2017 winners, and a way of thanking those friends and cohorts for getting me here. John, Devin, Summer, Tim, Patrick, Sue, Jeff, the whole crew at Club Jade, the grad students/lifeguards at Wakulla Springs…all of you. I literally wouldn’t be who I am today without you, and I don’t think I would have liked the person I would have been without you. I owe you all a drink, and I hope to have to chance to pay out in person.

As mentioned a couple of weeks back, things have been a little crazy around the Triffid Ranch, and not just because we went from rainstorms that would have stunned Gilgamesh to classic North Texas Hot’n’Dry with nary a transition. Details will follow very soon, but the upshot is that the Triffid Ranch outgrew its origins, and it’s time to evolve. Best of all, that evolution involves air conditioning.

I’m regularly asked by friends from outside Texas as to why I stay in the Dallas area. After all, Texas’s governor is a joke, Dallas doesn’t have a great historical reputation, and the city is entirely too close to Lewisville. Of course, McMurdo Station is too close to Lewisville. I stay because while so many other great cities of the world have so much to offer, Dallas is the only place I know where I can get up before dawn to go to the Day Job, wait at a train station for a transfer, and watch, in the day’s first light, giant robots with guitar necks for heads tromping through the city. With that sort of spectacle, how could you leave?

Posted onJuly 6, 2014|Comments Off on I’m Living In My Own Private Tanelorn, the Saladin Ahmed Edition

At the new Day Job, the relationship with my co-workers is still new enough that an idle conversation on any subject other than “so how was the weekend?” tends to veer off into “And how do you know this?” territory pretty quickly. At my age, it’s not as bad as it used to be: not only do co-workers expect at least a few interesting stories from anyone pushing 50, but the statute of limitations now usually applies to the better ones. Also, many of them are funny or at least curious now, but the old saw about how “comedy is tragedy that happens to other people” also applies when enough time has gone by that the stump no longer aches on cold rainy nights. Even so, some casual discourse still leads to my supervisor looking at me with that expression that says she’s looking for a convenient garbage can if in case she gets sick right then and there, and I have to remind myself that “C’mon, it isn’t THAT bad” isn’t always a suitable defense.

Even with the much more mundane stories, context and backstory is everything, as my writer friends often discover. Sometimes, the backstory becomes a bit of incipoient head explodey, as Saladin Ahmed discovered last week.

I’m going to go into further discussion on Saladin later this week, as his hugely enjoyable first novel Throne of the Crescent Moon made me consider how underutilized conventional and magical gardens are in contemporary fantasy novels and stories. His style and scope are regularly compared to that of the late Fritz Leiber, and I regularly joke with Saladin that, to quote another Texan, I knew Fritz Leiber and Saladin’s no Fritz Leiiber. HowEVER, I could see the two of them off in the corner at a conference or convention, gleefully comparing notes and asking “By the way, have you read this?” until they were kicked out for scaring the cleaning crew. (Me, partisan? You bet. Saladin was born not far away from where I was, and we Michigan kids stick together.)

Anyway, one of Saladin’s many interests is on how imagery from science fiction, comics, and role-playing games ends up in popular culture, and he recently shared via Twitter a collection of punk band flyers using classic Dungeons && Dragons illustrations. I could have told him about my adventures with introducing the Dallas skateboarding community to Stephen Jay Gould’s book Wonderful Life in 1992, directly leading to seemingly half of the band flyers in the city featuring the denizens of the Burgess Shale. Instead, since it was related to the subject at hand, I let him know that one of the remaining artifacts of my sordid youth still in my possession had more of a direct connection than he realized.

As mentioned, backstory is everything. At the end of 1987, I was a feckless twentysomething first encountering music that wasn’t in saturation airplay on our local AOR radio stations, and had become hooked on the backlist of famed Austin proto-punk legends The Butthole Surfers. Right about the time I started a new job at Texas Instruments, word got out that the Surfers were going to play at the Arcadia Theater, the famed and long-cremated live music venue on Dallas’s Greenville Avenue, and precious few things mattered to me more at that point than getting to the concert. Tickets were cheap, getting down to the Arcadia wasn’t as big a deal as they would be to someone who hadn’t already bicycled the length and breadth of the city, and the new job meant that the other bills were covered. And that’s when everything cratered. My roommate (now the famed glass artist Robert Whitus of Drink With The Living Dead) had a family crisis that required his moving back home, a slight bout of bronchitis that required a trip to the ER stripped out the extra funds, and working nights at Texas Instruments meant that there was no blasted way I could get that day off to hit a Surfers concert. Paul was a very sad boy, but he soldiered through, swearing that he was going to catch another Butthole Surfers show at another time.

(As it turned out, it never happened, but not for a lack of trying. When a big show promoting the album Independent Worm Saloon in 1993 was rained out in a nearly catastrophic thunderstorm that threatened to electrocute everyone on the stage, I took it as a sign that it simply wasn’t going to be. And wouldn’t you know that the rescheduled show conflicted with yet another new job, and I couldn’t even find anybody at the last minute to buy the tickets? I still have them around the house somewhere…)

Fast forward over two decades, to me wandering through the flagship Half Price Books store, up the road from where the Arcadia used to reside before it burned down in 2005. I can’t tell you why I started poking through that New Arrivals cart, but peeking from inside a box was a flyer from that very Butthole Surfers show that I missed. My own flyer had gone the way of all concert promotional material, but here was one in nearly pristine condition.

Now, its method of preservation also explained why I couldn’t just take it or just pay for the flyer and leave everything else. That flyer had been stuck inside a box for the last twenty years, where it had acted as a character sheet for a role-playing game. Specifically, it was a character sheet for the long-out-of-print TSR science fiction game Star Frontiers. If I wanted the flyer, I had to buy the whole game, and the stern crew at Half Price wasn’t about to let me get out of there without the full monty.

Now, that would have been enough of a solved mystery for the crew handling my estate sale, asking “Why the hell did he have this?” I haven’t bothered with gaming since I was in high school (although I used to paint lead miniatures for gifts for friends all the way up until about 1994), so it’s not like I had a stockpile of old games or something. Saladin’s notes about band flyers and role-playing games, though, made me want to get this out to the general public. Somewhere, someplace, is some fortysomething punk whose day is going to be made by a friend telling him “You remember that Dralasite character you used to play back in the Eighties? Well, he’s ONLINE!”

And to add to the embarrassment, I’m sending Saladin the whole game pack, flyer and all. He’ll probably have a blast of belated nostalgia going through the game rules. If he decides to auction off the flyer, though, he’ll probably pay off his kids’ college fund. I think Sludge the Dralasite would want it that way.

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It’s my firm belief that almost any holiday can be improved by adding a touch of Halloween to it. Christmas? Already been done, to great effect. Easter? Well, the man did say “This is my body: take of it and eat.” Arbor Day? That’s any given day in the Triffid Ranch greenhouse. There are limits: Veteran’s Day in the US and ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand. However, the ones generally labeled “overly commercial” can be amped up quite a bit by adding a touch of darkness at the right time, under the right circumstances.

One of the best in that category is St. Valentine’s Day, and not just because of roses and chocolate. Go out tonight and stare up into that absolutely magnificent full moon starting to rise this evening, and just tell me that you don’t have the urge to take after one of the most famed unorthodox yet incredibly devoted couples in movie and television history:

First, the congratulations. Old and dear friend Dave Hutchinson just saw his latest book, Europe in Autumn, published on both sides of the Atlantic. Considering that we’ve been commiserating over the state of journalistic careers on both shores for the better part of a decade, and he was sufficiently bereft of sense, taste, and sanity to buy my last book, the least I could do is pass on word. After all, he’s had to put up with me for a significant portion of the 21st Century so far, and that’s something that nobody should do without access to strong drink or electroshock therapy.

Anyway, it’s also time to remind him of why he worries about my coming to visit unbidden. As in his walking out of his house into the garden and tripping over my sleeping body on the front steps, with a big sign taped to my back reading “PLEASE TAKE ME IN”. Poor Dave already believes that Texas is a deathworld writ large, and he refuses to spell it out in correspondence. I tell him about armadillos, horned toads, mockingbirds, and coyotes, and he merely refers to my home as “Australia Lite”. More than fair: he’d last about five minutes outside of the United Kingdom anyway, and if he came here, he’d have to be wheeled around in a armored bubble like some deformed hamster, just to protect him from the mosquitoes and horseflies. Well, that and the mountain lions: I didn’t tell him about the mountain lions that sleep in the streets of Fort Worth.

Anyway, to celebrate his new book, I realized that I need to put together a package for him, and I told him so. I could hear the shudder of revulsion and horror from here. You’d think that we had chainsaw duels in the middle of downtown Dallas or something. (Well, we do, but only when fighting over prime parking spots on Friday nights. We’re not barbarians.) And this is why I figure it’s time to send him a collection of Texas ephemera, unique in its power to make him glibber and meep just a touch more in his sleep. The trick isn’t just to play on his fears that Texas is as bad as he suspects, but to go waaaaaay past those fears and burn Hank Hill cameos into his corpus callosum. This might take some effort.

Well, I’ve already found the first item, after the Czarina needed to make a trip out to the famed Turner Hardware. For those not familiar, this is the other Dallas icon named “Turner,” and not quite the force of nature as the other. (If we ever get Dave out here, this is someone I plan for him to meet, by the way. How often do you get the chance to meet the guy who justifiably beat the hell out of Kurt Cobain?) That said, we have the perfect garden decoration for Dave, absolutely guaranteed to keep his guests talking about him…and looking for easily-accessible sedatives. I could even tell those guests “Of course they’re real. How do you think we keep the horseflies from stealing the children out of the back yard?”

Well, this is a start, and a pile of swag that both Turners would be glad to assist in increasing. Now to find a rattlesnake ashtray…

Posted onFebruary 5, 2014|Comments Off on “If I owned Texas and Hell, I’d rent out Texas and live in Hell.”

Last week’s horrendous ice storm hitting the Southeast US missed most of North Texas, giving us a few scares but not inflicting any serious damage upon the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. We also missed out on the predicted icestorm coming through the area in time for Super Bowl Sunday, and even if we had, everyone was already prepared. We got some desperately needed rain last Sunday and on Tuesday morning, but the sleetstorm passed to the north, and we weren’t subjected to last-minute panics of idjits sliding around Dallas highways crying “I need to buy the bread and milk and hot wings!”

No, our problem is that, for North Texas, this is the Winter That Just Won’t Shut Up. We get bouts of seriously cold weather, yes, and usually right about now. For instance, we had the record snowfall in February 2010: for us, 12 inches of snow was “record”, but that’s to be expected. We also had the horrible ice storm and week of deep cold in February 2011, just in time for the big Super Bowl game hosted at the new Cowboys Stadium in Arlington. In 2012, though, we practically had a year without a winter, as we skirted freezing temperatures but never really went over. That was the late winter where the dogwood and quince trees started blooming in late February, and we all waited for a last-minute ice storm that, thankfully, never came through.

This winter, though, hasn’t been particularly abusive since the Icepocalypse in December. No major storms since then, no major power outages, and no glass-slick highways. The problem, though, is that we regularly and consistently go well below freezing almost every night, and have done so at least twice per week since the middle of December. I’ve now been in Texas for a third of a century and I’ve never seen a winter quite like this, and my mother-in-law, who keeps up with these things, can’t remember a winter like this in all of her time in Texas, either. Considering that she’s a native, I trust her assessment.

In the meantime, all Texans have one thing in common, no matter their political, economic, social, or educational backgrounds, and that’s our ability to kvetch about the weather. Some joke that we should make it into an Olympic sport, but our skill at complaining about inevitability means that nobody else could come close. It’s like entering the SpaceX Dragon in the bicycle race, and then wondering why the silver and bronze winners had such lousy times. And with a winter like this, we’re currently stomping the pros. After two months of cold, nasty, depressing weather, we’re starting to sound like Chicagoans, and that’s saying something.

The real worry? We’re whimpering and snuffling and grumbling now about how cold it is, and how we can’t wait until summer. Oh, woe, we’ll never thaw out! Misery, despair, high heating bills! WhatEVER will we do? I worry because we’re only four months away from the beginning of summer, and even the most vile Texas winter is a kiss compared to the blasting nightmare waiting for us in June and July. And I’m not looking forward to the pterosaur rookery impersonation coming from legions of maroons just waiting to tell each other, and anybody they can catch, “It’s HOT!” all through August.

So, yeah, go ahead and sing your select cuts from the Frozen soundtrack. Have fun. I can tell you what to expect for a soundtrack in July, and you aren’t going to like it:

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A little interlude. Every one of us has a nemesis, an irritation that makes a person want to recreate the last ten minutes of a Sam Peckinpah or George Romero film. I am just like you. I know one person that gets me roiled to the point of contemplated murder. This is an individual whom, if I ever get in a situation where I’m alone with him for more than five minutes, I’m going to do horrible things to him. First, it’s a matter of nailing his feet to the floor, without taking off his shoes first, and soaking him with a fire hose full of pepper spray. Then it’s time to take off his arms with an angle grinder and cauterize the stumps with a blowtorch. Then I’m going to rig him up with his eyes held open, in front of one of those portable DVD players, A Clockwork Orange-style, and leave him there with the William Shatner movie Free Enterprise running over and over. When I come back in a month, then I’m going to get mean.

It wasn’t always like this. Twenty years ago, I was blissfully unaware of my nemesis. But he kept pushing it. He went out of his way to drive me to this state, and when I take out his tongue and fill the space in his mouth with fire ants, I plan to remind him of this. Slowly. Carefully. With the understanding that it didn’t need to come to this, but he was so damn determined.

My first exposure to him came in the early Nineties. I was dating an ER nurse, and she told me about him. At least once per day, as often as ten on a weekend night, they’d get some poor schlub with gunshot wounds, stab wounds, or a fireplace poker fitted rectally, and they all had the same story. “I was on my porch, minding my own business, when Some Guy came up out of nowhere and shot/stabbed/sodomized me and then took off. No, I don’t know who Some Guy is, and I can’t ID him.” At first, I thought she was joking, considering the amount of stress she was in, and then EMT techs told me the same thing. A few trips to the ER on my own for various reasons, and I even heard it: Some Guy, over and over. He’d come in, wound with impunity, and disappear like the protagonist in the film Bruiser, over and over and over.

At that time, though, he hadn’t actually committed any offense against me. Sure, he inconvenienced my girlfriend, but she claimed she was used to it by now. In a way, Some Guy gave her job security, because the paperwork was less. “Cause of Injury: Some Guy”.

That didn’t last long. Shortly afterward, I started working as a clerk for ITT Hartford’s Worker’s Comp division, and I had to clean up his messes. “Some Guy tripped me at work.” “Some Guy left spilled vegetable oil all over the floor, and I threw out my back slipping on it.” “Some Guy told me that if the adjuster denied my claim, I should camp out in the building stairwell all weekend and confront the adjuster firsthand when she gets into the office on Monday.” It was obvious that Some Guy moonlighted in the building, too, as when a supervisor told us all that comparing notes as to which of us got a raise was grounds for termination, in blatant violation of the Labor Act of 1936. When asked who told her that this was grounds for termination, she answered “Some Guy in Legal.”

Ah, so no wonder Some Guy kept getting away with popping caps in asses. He was a lawyer, so he knew his way around the legal system. Certainly, calling the police and telling the dispatcher “You know, Some Guy works in my office” got no response, so I wrote it off. Some Guy can’t be everywhere, can he?

Ah, but he was. I went from that office to a weekly newspaper, and found that I couldn’t be hired on full-time because they needed to do so for the “humor” columnist. Said alleged humorist was extremely popular according to the editor, based on the fan letters and E-mails received, and they all came from Some Guy. Some Guy even wrote those letters in the editor’s handwriting and with the editor’s IP address, to throw everyone off the scent. I took another job in Portland, Oregon, based on recommendations from friends about how great Portland was. Once I escaped eighteen months later, I asked “Have you ever been to Portland?”

“No, but I was told that it was a great place.”
“And who told you this?”
“Some Guy.”

It just kept getting better and better. After moving back to Texas, Some Guy really had it out for me. My phone number had belonged to a drug rehab center that had shut down five years earlier, and for the next five years I had that phone number, I was awakened at all hours by people calling up asking “Is this Darco Drug Labs?” When I’d ask who gave them this number, the answer was almost always the same: You Know Who. When the answer wasn’t “Some Guy,” I’d get a contact number for the facility, church, or Narcotics Anonymous sponsor who passed on the number, and I’d ask them where they got it. Three guesses as to the person who supplied it.

After a while, I realized that Some Guy didn’t have it out just for me. He had it out for all of humanity, with a deep and obsessive hatred of the entire species. Talk to anybody who works in retail. “Some Guy told me that your manager will give me a discount if I ask for it.” “Some Guy left me a big box full of samples for free, and if you don’t give them to me, I’ll sue.” “Well, Some Guy told me that I can keep anacondas in a ten-gallon fishtank, and all I have to do is not feed them so much so they’ll stay small.” “I can’t believe it. Some Guy told me that you had a bottle of wine that nobody else has ever heard of and doesn’t show up in your inventory database, so you’d better find it NOW.” Talk to anybody who works a Customer Service phone center, and they’ll tell you not just what they’ll do to Some Guy when he’s caught, but how they’ll set the corpse on fire and sow the ashes with salt to prevent him from coming back.

And why do I bring all of this up? At least four times this week, I’ve been contacted by people seeking to buy a Venus flytrap. Not a problem there in the slightest, but then they tell me “We’ve got a problem with mosquitoes in our back yard, and we want to get a flytrap to eat them all.”

“Huh. Interesting. You do know that flytraps generally don’t catch mosquitoes, and even when they do, they actually attract them, don’t you?”

“That’s not what I’ve heard. Someone told me that one plant will eat all of my mosquitoes.”

“And who told you this?”

“Some Guy.”

Yeah. I think I’m going to skip out on the fire ants and the angle grinder. I just need to find out where I can rent a sausage grinder and a cubic meter of live rats. I’m going to keep the DVD player right there, though, because some people are so foul that they deserve the worst punishments imaginable.

In other developments, I’d like to point out that I’m dying. It’s slow and methodical, and it’s too late for treatment. In fact, it’s so nasty that I wouldn’t wish this on several ex-bosses. Slow strangulation, gasping for breath, various discharges that point to severe reactions…and the best part is that I have photos of my murderers. Some people should be so lucky.

Whatever you do, don’t be complacent the way I was. Just rip those lungs out, get gill slits implanted, and spend the rest of the summer on the bottom of a swimming pool. *death rattle*

I have to thank Sid Raisch of Advantage Development System on a regular basis anyway, because he’s constantly coming across new angles for small horticultural businesses. He and I don’t always see eye-to-eye, either in politics or in horticultural concepts, but I’m damn glad that he’s there to keep me honest. I’m even more glad to know him because of some of the oddness he brings to the conversation.

For instance, Sid is probably one of the only people in the plant trade watching the potential for 3-D printing in the business. 3-D printing is finally leaving the domain of thirtysomethings making toys all day, and becoming an exceedingly valuable prototyping tool. To that end, Sid had to share a piece on 3-D printed planter bricks, produced by Emerging Objects out of Oakland. The concept as presented by Emerging Objects isn’t just to incorporate vertical gardens into new buildings, but to offer multiple methods to keep them going.

From a Texas perspective, I’m rather skeptical of the idea without actually holding one of these printed ceramic bricks and field-testing it. Oh, it sounds great, especially for small walls. And then you consider the incredible hyrdraulic pressures of most plant roots, and how any plant root that can get through a microscopic crack in any surface will. Then there’s the problems with trying to replace the planter bricks as they wear out or get damaged. And then you remember how easily a really good Dallas hailstorm would turn a building facade constructed of these into one big shrapnel bomb. Or how a typical gullywasher storm would flood out most of these. Or, as my friend Amie Spengler brought up, do you really want to be the person assigned to refill all of these planter bricks?

Courtesy of Emerging Objects, by way of Urban Gardens

Aside from those concerns, I have a really big one. A lot of the aforementioned problems could be mitigated by setting these bricks in an indoor environment. It’s just that I spent far too much of my childhood hanging out with science fiction people, so I see these samples and think “Now I know what the restrooms on Babylon 5 look like.” It just gets worse from there: “I’ll be right back. I gotta hit the head…erm, gall bladder…um, xiphoid process…forget it. I can hold it.”

Posted onMarch 20, 2013|Comments Off on I’m living in my own private Tanelorn: Tax Day

Here in the US, our Tax Day is April 15, and the Czarina and I are glad to have ours done and out a month early. State sales taxes are due next month, and I already have that under control, too. However, I found myself quoting Dylan Moran quite a bit while getting everything in order.

For those unfamiliar with this scenario, this scene comes from the first episode of the brilliant Britcom Black Books, starring Dylan Moran, Tamsin Grieg, and Nepenthes namesake Bill Bailey. In particular, anybody who has ever worked in a bookstore or comic shop can appreciate the basic premise: in my case, I worked for the comics industry equivalent of Bernard Black when I lived in Wisconsin in 1986.

Posted onMarch 1, 2013|Comments Off on I’m Living In My Own Private Tanelorn: Cormorants

Considering how crazy March promises to be, let’s look upon the wonders of the February just past. Namely, with photos of cormorants in the big artificial lake separating the Arlington Convention Center with whatever they’re calling the Texas Rangers ballpark this week.

I can’t speak for everywhere else, but it’s been obvious for a while that Punxatawney Phil is a Texan. The daffodils are already out in force, and the peach trees have their first glimmerings of blooms…let’s just hope we don’t have a last-minute snowstorm the way we did in 2010, eh?

Posted onFebruary 14, 2013|Comments Off on “You want out of here? You talk to me, eh?”

Show season advances, which requires trips for essential supplies. During one of those trips, I discovered that one of my local Target stores was expecting a much colder winter than what we’ve received in Dallas so far. Either the manager expected a repeat of the record snowstorm of 2010 or the week-long ice storm of 2011, or s/he came to Dallas from a much higher latitude. Either way, the collection of deeply-discounted winter survival gear brought back lots of memories of my childhood in Michigan.

For the record, when you need them, removable ice cleats are a godsend in Dallas. Unfortunately, you might only need them for a grand total of three days every ten years or so.

And then there were the all-in-one ice scrapers, complete with handles to assist with getting enough torque to take off inches or even feet of rime. I was half-tempted to buy one of these and strap it to the side of my bicycle pack, but the Czarina, as usual, expressed the voice of reason. Voice of reason, voice of doom, it’s all the same with her.

Oh, that was just the beginning. Heavy steel multi-use scrapers for breaking ice off sidewalks and driveways. Standard scrapers with fur-lined gloves sewn around them. Heat packs. Wind visors. It suddenly occurred to me that nobody’s made the definitive Canadian post-apocalyptic road movie, something along the lines of “Depressed Doug”. Or had someone made it after all?

A little treat from the archives. One of the reasons why I keep returning to Texas every time I leave? It’s not just because of the intense rainbows when we get our classic gullywasher storms. It’s not that we regularly get double and sometimes triple rainbows during those storms. It’s that these photos were taken on Thanksgiving Day 2012. Rainbows instead of snowstorms? Yes, thank you.

I’m starting to worry about the Czarina. Something’s wrong with her. For the last few days, she’s been oddly…agreeable. Since I, like Bill Cosby’s kids, cannot sleep through the night unless I’ve had a good beating, a few suggestions on garden ornamentation are usually enough to guarantee that I’m completely unconscious for twelve hours or more at a time. That could be the concussion talking, too, but I like to think it’s because I made particularly good suggestions.

However, I guess the dent in the top of my head left by her sharp elbows has made her remarkably sympathetic. Either that, or she’s worried that the top of my skull can double as a guacamole bowl, and she hates guacamole. (Hey, she puts up with my multiple foibles, including that horrible deformed tumor atop my neck, so I give her no grief about her one flaw.) The first sign was that she revoked a longrunning ban on new citrus. For years, she insisted that I was only allowed two citrus trees for my own personal use. If I felt so inclined to sell them, she stated, she was fine, but if they were staying, TWO. Only TWO. I kept that promise, sticking to a Rio Star ruby red grapefruit I grew from seed and a Buddha’s Hand citron. Now, though, she comes to me unbidden and asks “How hard would it be to raise a Mexican lime tree so we can make Key lime pie?”

You know, some guys would take horrible advantage of their wives being in such a flexible state, and she regularly thanks Crom, Issek, and Nyarlathotep that I have no interest in football or other pro sports. Instead, I brought her out to the local garden center and picked out a beautiful little Mexican lime tree of her very own, and a new “Pink Lemonade” blueberry bush to replace the one the drought took out last summer for myself. I wasn’t worried about her, but I was concerned.

It’s December 21, and nothing happened this morning. You’re welcome. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a shower, get some sleep, and try to find a replacement Red Lantern ring. Mine burned out last night. And for those who were expecting everything to fall apart today, a word from one of my childhood role models:

As par for the course in North Texas, we currently alternate between record high temperatures and sudden drops well below freezing, some in the same day. The Nepenthes and other tropical carnivores are all indoors, soaking up as much sunlight as they can and sucking up artificial light the rest of the time. The temperate carnivores went into dormancy with our first big freeze two weeks ago. The Roridula gorgonias seedlings…well, I don’t even pretend to know what they’re doing any more. The Bhut Jolokia and Trinidad Scorpion plants are under cover and currently enjoying the sudden gusts of heat. The rest of the year now leans toward support and supply here at the Triffid Ranch, and that’s not including plans for building a new greenhouse this spring.

Likewise, the Day Job is a bit lacking in green this time of year, and a sudden run on my old friend Araucaria heterophylla at the local grocery store inspired me. “What’s wrong with a live tree? Even better, what’s wrong with bringing in a bit of Mesozoic holiday cheer?”

Naturally, it wasn’t enough simply bringing in a Norfolk Island pine. It definitely wasn’t enough to relate how it’s one of the last survivors of a once-extensive group of conifers now mainly represented by the monkey puzzle tree and the Wollemi pine. No, one of the advantages of being a palaeontology junkie is that people give me all sorts of unbidden dinosaur-related paraphernalia. Over the last 25 years or so, friends, relatives, and even a couple of ex-girlfriends contributed to the pile of dinosaur-related tree ornaments and lights, and a fair number had to go on ol’ A. heterophylla. Combine them with some of the new LED holiday lights, and the whole thing doesn’t look so bad.

Naturally, every Christmas tree needs a topper ornament, and stars are just so overdone. Next year, I’m going to make an Archaeopteryx topper, just so it’ll become art.

And since the Day Job is in the tech arena, the tree needed an appropriate nativity. Again, between the stuff I’ve been given and decorations from co-workers’ cubicles, we had quite the ensemble. For the record, the Burgess Shale critters in the front are mine, and they may or may not become ornaments on their own one day.

Look: the Spirit of New Year’s Eve.

Finally, I had to add something for a special niece who’s becoming quite the comics artist. Several co-workers with kids have noted the whole push on the Elf on the Shelf trend, and I can understand the idea. Isn’t it better, though, to have someone watching to see if you’re good and kicking your butt up around your shoulderblades if you aren’t?

Who, Where, and Why

Who: The Texas Triffid Ranch is a gallery specializing in carnivorous, prehistoric, and otherwise exotic plants.
Where: As the name implies, the Triffid Ranch is based in the Dallas, Texas area.
Why: And why not?
How: Contact at txtriffidranch@gmail.com for more details.